Patton Oswalt: ‘I’ll Never Be at 100 Percent Again’

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The comedian Patton Oswalt at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood, Calif. Mr. Oswalt’s wife died in April, and it has been a long, hard climb for him to return to comedy.CreditKendrick Brinson for The New York Times

The Golden State Killer, a name she coined while working on a book about him, raped and murdered dozens of victims in the 1970s and ’80s and remains at large. After years of investigative reporting into these unsolved murders, Ms. McNamara believed she was close to tracking him down, and was working long days and nights, her obsessive determination overwhelming her mounting anxiety.

Worried about her health, her husband, the comedian Patton Oswalt, suggested that she take a night to “sleep until you wake up.” It was a phrase they used to describe what could seem like an impossible luxury for the working parents of a 7-year-old girl. So on April 21, Ms. McNamara took some Xanax and went to bed.

Sitting in an empty room near the bar at the Chateau Marmont hotel here on a Friday afternoon this month, Mr. Oswalt, 47, recounted what happened next the way a detective exhaustively details a case he has been running over in his mind.

After getting up early, he helped his daughter, Alice, get dressed, packed her lunch and drove her to school, then picked up a cup of his wife’s favorite coffee. Back home, he went to their bedroom, where she was snoring. He gently placed the Americano on a bedside table. It was 9:40 a.m.

Mr. Oswalt went to his home office, answered emails, did two phone interviews and noticed some sad news online: Prince had died. He shot off a series of tweets and returned to his bedroom to find his wife still in bed. She wasn’t breathing. It was 12:42 p.m. When the paramedics arrived, they pronounced her dead.

Her death was so shocking that Mr. Oswalt refused to believe the scene in front of him. In tears, he clung to the notion he was living a nightmare, trying to will himself awake. “I was literally blinking trying to get out of this,” he recalled.

Six months later, the coroner’s office still has not declared a cause of death. “I have a feeling it might have been an overdose,” he said, citing the Xanax. “That’s what the paramedics there were saying while I was screaming and throwing up.”

This was, Mr. Oswalt said, the second worst day of his life: “The worst is when I told my daughter the next day.”

He paused his rushing monologue, his voice lowering as he skipped over that awful memory to one from the next day, when Alice mentioned “Inside Out,” the Pixar film peopled with characters representing a girl’s emotional states. “I guess Sadness is doing her job right now,” she said.

Mr. Oswalt may be best known as a star of television (“The King of Queens,” “The Goldbergs”) and film (“Young Adult,” “Ratatouille”), but the backbone of an acclaimed career that includes two best sellers, a Twitter account with almost three million followers and a sideline as a Hollywood script doctor has been his stand-up. For nearly three decades, his ambitious comedy has leaned on articulate and slyly constructed set pieces filled with flamboyant metaphors and ornate flourishes.

After beginning in Washington in the 1980s at Garvin’s, the same club where Dave Chappelle got his start, he moved to the West Coast and became one of the influential early voices of alternative comedy as well as of the Comic-Con-fueled fandom that has emerged as a pop culture force. In his greatest stand-up special, “Werewolves and Lollipops” (2007), his fanboy obsessions are a theme. In the most memorable bit, he delivered a virtuosic rant imagining going back in time and killing George Lucas before he had a chance to make the “Star Wars” prequels.

Currently at the height of his fame — he won an Emmy in September for his most recent stand-up special, “Talking for Clapping” — he finds himself confronting unfathomable tragedy, trying to escape his despair, with little success, and cope with his grief through performance. Considering his longtime preoccupations, it’s no surprise that even when trying to come to grips with crushing loss, he resorts to the language and context of comic books and movies.

He said he now saw the lie of so many of his favorite comic books that portray the impact of a death in the family. “If Bruce Wayne watched his parents murdered at 9, he wouldn’t become this cut hero,” he said, referring to the Batman origin story. “He would become Gotham’s most annoying slam poet. How about someone dies, and they just get fat and angry and confused? But no, immediately, they’re at the gym.”

Mr. Oswalt says he has never been less healthy: crippled by sadness, struggling to hold it together day by day. He went to counseling, read C. S. Lewis’s “A Grief Observed” and reread the part of Stephen King’s “On Writing” that describes struggling to work after a debilitating injury, taking satisfaction in finishing one page.

Mr. Oswalt also tried drinking. “I found out the hard way these past few months that alcohol really doesn’t help,” he said, letting out a dramatic sigh.

As serious fans of his comedy know, Mr. Oswalt has suffered from depression, but this, he said, was far worse. “Depression is more seductive,” he said. “Its tool is: ‘Wouldn’t it be way more comfortable to stay inside and not deal with people?’ Grief is an attack on life. It’s not a seducer. It’s an ambush or worse. It stands right out there and says: ‘The minute you try something, I’m waiting for you.’”

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At the Emmy Awards in September.CreditKevin Winter/Getty Images

One thing Mr. Oswalt said had been therapeutic was stand-up. Last month, he started working on a new hour of material (more than half of which, he said, will focus on his grief) that he will perform at the Beacon Theater in New York on Thursday, Nov. 3, as part of the New York Comedy Festival. Going onstage, he said, was “a rebuke to grief, an acceptance of the messiness of life. I’ll never be at 100 percent again, but that won’t stop me from living this.”

When he did stand-up for the first time since his wife’s death, at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Los Angeles in September, he felt some shame, he admitted. “I projected onto the audience: Your wife is dead and you’re telling jokes? What’s wrong with you?”

But he plowed forward. His first set was clunky. The same night, he tried again at an open mike at a Chinese restaurant. Neither performance was great, he said, but each provided some solace. “It was like: O.K., the world didn’t end,” he said.

His brother, Matt Oswalt, who has been trying to take Mr. Oswalt’s mind off his grief with long hikes, said working was cathartic: “It’s home for him. He’s been doing stand-up since he was 18. It’s normalcy.”

When Patton Oswalt met Ms. McNamara, in 2003, he was not the beloved comedian and actor he is today. “Before I met her, I was in a snotty, sort of slacker Largo scene,” he said, referring to the Los Angeles club that became a major launching pad of comedy talent in the 1990s. “A lot of my stuff was making fun of abstract pop culture in a way that was removed emotionally.”

Ms. McNamara challenged him to be more personal. “When you get to ‘Werewolves and Lollipops,’ we’re on the way to getting married, I’m way more vulnerable. I’m not always articulate in what I’m saying. And maybe I have some problems, too.”

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With his daughter, Alice, in 2015.CreditJesse Grant/Getty Images for Disney

His next stand-up show, “My Weakness Is Strong,” from 2009, which begins with an endearing story about his wife texting him “I love you,” explores more mature territory, including his own cynicism and fatherhood. “You see that progression, and that’s all because of her. She said to me: ‘Be honest and vulnerable about yourself.’”

As on the day she died, Mr. Oswalt has occasionally entertained the idea that his loss has not been real. One question has popped into his head several times: What if he is actually the one who has died?

“What if, as my last brain cell died, I imagined a whole other life, that my brain cannot deal with the horror of my body dying, so it’s made up the next worst thing, which is this person who I wanted to spend the rest of my life with has been yanked away from me?” he said, his voice getting ragged, spinning this scenario out, proposing that the interview he was doing at the moment was an invention of his own mind. After comparing his life to a scene from the movie “Jacob’s Ladder,” he stopped: “Sorry, I sound crazy.”

Since Ms. McNamara’s death, Mr. Oswalt has made it a ritual to sit with his daughter every night and write down three things they remember about her. “It keeps this living portrait of her,” he said, choking up.

Spending time with Alice provides perhaps the ultimate relief. “She has probably helped Patton as much as Patton helped her,” Matt Oswalt said. “I saw him the first time he saw Alice after Michelle died, and the color just came back into his face.”

Mr. Oswalt has committed himself to finishing his wife’s book, working with a researcher and another journalist. “We can finish the book, but it was tangential to the work, which was: She was going to solve this crime,” he said. “She didn’t want credit for it. She wanted him to be locked up. She was close to figuring it out. It would give her bad nightmares.” Mr. Oswalt paused briefly to consider the right metaphor. “In comic-book terms,” he said. “I was married to a great crime fighter.”

Correction:

An article last Sunday about the actor and comedian Patton Oswalt misstated part of the title of a stand-up special for which he won an Emmy. As an accompanying picture correctly noted, it is “Talking for Clapping,” not “Talking While Clapping.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR18 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘I’ll Never Be at 100 Percent Again’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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